The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (51 page)

U’Sumi’s depression ignited like some seeping volatile gas into full-blown terror.
She knew we were coming long before the oracle sent word; perhaps long before I was even born!

The gloss-twisted reflection
patterns
like
trapped faces
on
every
floor tile
silently
began to
scream
in flickers
like the burning damned.

A’Nu-Ahki replied,
“Thank you for your gracious reception
.
I must say that
to
fly
like
one of the birds of the sky is most exhilarating. I appreciate the opportunity you have afforded us to experience it.”

She gave a narrow smile that nearly split her face wide open to reveal the grinning skull underneath. “You will shortly have the opportunity again. But I get ahead of myself.”

A’Nu-Ahki said, “Where is your spirit-husband? In what way does he choose to manifest himself these days?”

U’Sumi’s blood froze.
These days?

The woman scowled—a position
to which
her disturbingly taut face seemed more accustomed. “You come before Isha’Tahar, the Queen of Heaven, and demand of her an audience with her Lord? He speaks through me! Goodness knows he uses me for precious little else
anymore
.” A distant longing for pleasures long spent lingered in her bleary eyes.

“What new terror will he unleash upon the world?”

Isha’Tahar sighed. “Nothing quite
as
final as what you bring.”

“I do not bring
W
orld-end. I simply announce it. The folly of your husband and sons and that of humankind brings it.”

Her face twisted into a sudden fury that made even her soldiers step backwards. “Have I given birth to these, my own people, only to glut the sea with their bodies as though they were fish?”

A trickle of blood ran down her forehead and paused at her brow.

A’Nu-Ahki replied softly, “So, you too think it will be water.”

“I read the Star Signs too and remember well enough how Seti laid out the skies.” She daubed the blood from her face and flopped back down onto her golden chair. “My husband, however, is no longer so convinced.”

“Not surprising. Neither are any of the other Watchers. They all seem to think that E’Yahavah won’t follow through; that he treasures this world and its people too highly and will likely grant your husband and his rivals the time they think they need to complete their experiments.”

“Is there no hope of that then? Is it not a reasonable compromise?”

“What your husband and the others refuse to realize is that it is precisely because
E’Yahavah treasures humanity that he will not let the Watchers finish. He will destroy Man with the Earth rather than allow the
eternal defacing of the
human race into something of infinitely unfolding evil. He will not permit all humanity to be lost beyond hope of redemption. This can’t be solved by negotiation, sorcery, technology, or even the most
benign
effort to civilize society. Do you think the Divine Name would let himself to be out-maneuvered by a group of bickering celestial amateurs?”

She shrugged, as if she knew he was right. Her voice, however, took on a plaintive whine. “Isn’t a defaced world better than no world at all?”

U’Sumi marveled at this exchange. He had no idea that his father had ever spoken to Isha’Tahar before. That she talked of
W
orld-end as if she believed in it shocked him out of his terror and strangely elated him.

A’Nu-Ahki answered her, “You forget that E’Yahavah cannot deny his own nature. He cannot ignore justice any more than he can forsake love. It would betray the essence of who he is. The Wergild of Blood
must be satisfied. It is the only way to regain any part at all of what has been lost.”

Isha’Tahar slumped in her chair like a petulant little girl. “Samyaza and the others meant to win back humanity for
E’Yahavah
! Why should they be treated this way when they meant well?”

“Did they really?
E’Yahavah
told them plainly that they would only make things worse. Samyaza and his band imagined that they knew better. Rather than winning humanity back, they only played into the Basilisk’s hand by speeding up the spiritual—and now genetic—erosion of life. Seeking to impose their own image on Man, they further
distorted what was left of the D
ivine image there. This accelerated the need for judgment before it would have otherwise been necessary. No plan
that
Samyaza or the others devise can reverse that. How can the dead
breathe
life into the dead?”

The howling shadow in the darkened alcoves now swelled into the central chamber like a pressurized fluid, stifling U’Sumi’s very breath. It was like Shadow-mind,
yet somehow different—less calculating, more explosive in its passions. Until now
,
it had also been silent.

An old woman’s terrorized whimper pleaded briefly from the dais.

U’Sumi looked up at Isha’Tahar and noticed that a foreign gleam had suddenly animated her eyes.

“My plan will work because I now have the strength to strike
the Basilisk
at his stronghold!”
a hideous masculine gryndel-voice roared through the Queen’s mouth.
“I will never be his slave!”

T’Qinna and Yafutu clung to U’Sumi’s sides. He wrapped his arms over both of them to keep his own limbs from shaking.

A’Nu-Ahki, animated by the Divine Wind, faced the gender-mingled incarnation of the mad Watcher alone.
“
W
here is this stronghold?”
h
e
asked.

“Where it all began!”
howled the Old Woman’s shell,
“in Aeden! Don’t you see? It is where he has hidden all along!”

A’Nu-Ahki shook his head and laughed. “How can you be so naive, Samyaza?
The Basilisk has
played
you
like a pawn since
long before
you fell upon Mount Ardis. Will you now carry
out
his
masterstroke out against yourself? Don’t you see? That’s his plan for all of us! Drag us through the mud of greed, violence, false pretenses of virtue, and lust, until we’re totally driven by our own out-of-control impulses. Then he laughs while he watches us kill ourselves in our own madness!”

“You know nothing! I cannot die!”

“There are worse things than death! Have you consulted Metatron? He who shouted for joy with you when the Sons of
A’Nu
rejoiced together at the first dawn has warned you that my words are true.”

The new name meant nothing to U’Sumi.
Yet
it raised the weirdest question: Was his father actually trying to win back a fallen Watcher?

The Beast-hag snarled,
“Metatron no longer comes at my call
.
But there are many who still do!”

The demonized crone clapped her hands in three echoing strokes.

From either side of
her
throne alcove stepped two monstrous titans of a kind U’Sumi had only heard about, but never personally seen. A circle of horny natural spikes crowned each of their heads
,
and an oily exoskeletal hide encased their chests and arms in crocodilian facets. Despite their enormous size and bizarre appearance, they had a strange symmetrical beauty that made
it
hard to look away from
them
.

Both giants held a woman each, huddled beneath their arms like dark rag dolls some insane little girl had overdressed and badly painted.

The two
women
resembled each other so closely that U’Sumi guessed them to be twins. They were not young, though still close to the prime of their beauty—maybe
the same age as
Pandura—perhaps in their early three-hundreds at most. As they emerged from the silken shadows behind the dais, the two Giants released them.

A’Nu-Ahki fell backward a step. He seemed about to speak, but his words had been murdered in his throat.

U’Sumi noticed in the slightly better light that the reason the two women
wore so much
reddish-tan cosmetics
had little to do with vanity
. For some reason they avoided looking at his father, though they scrutinize
d
the Seer’s
companions
.

“I see you found them,” A’Nu-Ahki whispered when he recovered some of his composure.

The left Titan spoke as if displaying trophies. “We never lost them.
”

“Why did you deceive me then?”

The other Giant answered, “They would not have come to you.”

U’Sumi’s father roared, “Is that why they need so much make-up to hide their bruises? Do they enjoy your battering that much?”

“It’s not like that!” the woman on the right said, raking a hand through her copper-tinged sienna-ash hair. Her gold-rimmed eyes faced U’Sumi to avoid A’Nu-Ahki’s glare.

“Then what is it like?”

This time the other woman spoke
.
“You can’t possibly understand! But please try to accept.”

“Accept what? That you’ve willingly married these creatures that intimidate and beat you for sport or lack of self-control? How can you even ask me to accept that?”

“I told you if he ever came he wouldn’t understand,” the Left Woman said to the Right.

“Tell me in plain words what you want me to accept!”

Neither of the women seemed willing to take A’Nu-Ahki’s challenge, but finally the one on the right made an effort.

“Our espoused ones were dead! ‘Vayi and ‘Yaho took care of us! They kept the soldiers from getting too far out of control! They tried to help others of us too. You judge them by the way they
look on the outside, but mostly they are kind and gentle. Sure, they
sometimes
lose their temper
s,
but who doesn’t? More often they give pleasure, not pain.”

“Pleasure?
” A’Nu-Ahki spoke in that same terrible voice U’Sumi had heard him use on his mother after Tarbet’s visit.
Who are these women?

The Right-hand Woman had a feeble tremor in her voice. “That didn’t come out right. I meant that they try to do the right thing most of the time—to do the kind thing. They’re trying to change! Trying to improve themselves and those they command!”

The other sister said,
“Put yourself in their place
! W
hat if someone you didn’t even know came along with strange foreign arguments and a few remarkably fulfilled prophecies and then demanded because of it that you reject everything you had ever been taught about Q’Enukki, the First Fathers, and E’Yahavah? Not only that, but that you must betray your heritage—your very own father to his face! Could you do that? Would it seem right to you? Yet that is what you ask of them!”

U’Sumi watched, dumbfounded, as his father merely stood there, shaking his head.
Why doesn’t he answer her?

That silence itself became an inner noise that joined the screeching howl of the consuming Shadow all around them. The shifting warped reflections on the glassy floor that looked like screaming faces and pressing hands—faces with empty black eye-sockets—grew more and more animated. Obsidian flame burned beneath them, as if the tiles were but locked window panes on the roof of some horrible chamber below.

U’Sumi gave his father what seemed an interminable time to answer, but nothing happened. The longer the silence went, the more deafening the howl of the Blackness. He became sure that the only way to break the madness was to speak. But it was hard now even to breath
e
.

“Honored ladies, mighty titans, I’m a bit young to speak here, but there’s something I respectfully think we’re all missing.”

The women glared at him as to demand,
who the Underworld are you?
Yet
they said nothing. Even the Giants and the
Beast-hag on the throne seemed
somehow frozen in time.

U’Sumi’s voice harnessed this pause like some force of nature that w
ent
beyond nature—perhaps the same time-bending power as his fighting Gift. When he spoke, the suffocating presence in the chamber parted before him
, as
El-N’Lil
blasted a hole in its
oppressive shadow. He addressed the woman who had last spoken.

“What you say
on
what seems right would be true if my father could just make up his own truth and his own
world
inside his own head. Then you, your titans
,
and their father could do the same. But that’s not reality.